Liquid Marble Interaction Gate for Collision-Based Computing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a collision-based computing gate using liquid marbles, enabling digital logic operations without electronics, which could lead to fluidic computing devices with potential for complex circuit implementation.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental liquid marble collision gate based on Margolus' soft-sphere principles, enabling Boolean logic operations in a fluidic medium.

Findings

The gate performs AND and AND-NOT functions.

Liquid marbles can be used to implement digital logic.

Potential for constructing fluidic half-adders and full-adders.

Abstract

Liquid marbles are microlitre droplets of liquid, encapsulated by self-organised hydrophobic particles at the liquid/air interface. They offer an efficient approach for manipulating liquid droplets and compartmentalising reactions in droplets. Digital fluidic devices employing liquid marbles might benefit from having embedded computing circuits without electronics and moving mechanical parts (apart from the marbles). We present an experimental implementation of a collision gate with liquid marbles. Mechanics of the gate follows principles of Margolus' soft-sphere collision gate. Boolean values of the inputs are given by the absence (FALSE) or presence (TRUE) of a liquid marble. There are three outputs: two outputs are trajectories of undisturbed marbles (they only report TRUE when just one marble is present at one of the inputs), one output is represented by trajectories of colliding marbles (when two marbles collide they lose their horizontal momentum and fall), this output reports TRUE only when two marbles are present at inputs. Thus the gate implements AND and AND-NOT logical functions. We speculate that by merging trajectories representing AND-NOT output into a single channel one can produce a one-bit half-adder. Potential design of a one-bit full-adder is discussed, and the synthesis of both a pure nickel metal and hybrid nickel/polymer liquid marble is reported.